Why did who purchase so much of Greensboro’s Urban Loop real estate so early?

Nowhere else in North Carolina has DOT amassed such an agglomeration of real estate, says Bonnie Tripp Simmons, DOT administrative agent in Raleigh whose duties include managing all this property.

 

“Greensboro is a unique situation,” she says. “We have property in other places, not to that volume.”

 

DOT’s holdings stretch in bits and pieces across the entire 18-mile spectrum of the unfinished loop. It has spent from $3.7 million to $9.9 million on land for each of the four sections that are left.

 

Simmons says she has no clue why DOT accumulated so much along parts of a route that might not be completed until the 2020 or later.

 

…DOT’s preference is to buy land no sooner than a couple of years before it’s paved in asphalt and concrete.

 

“Acquiring land really is the last activity before construction,” said Doug Allison, manager of DOT’s right-of-way office in the state capital.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record, July 12, 2009